China is among the leading players in global development. In recent years, it has spent very significant sums on projects in countries in the global south, including via the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, a transcontinental strategy aiming to improve connectivity and cooperation between Asia, Africa, and Europe. The project is described as a way to connect China more effectively to its trading partners, but it has also served to build Chinese political power.
As part of that spending, China has committed significant sums to development issues. But unlike most bilateral donors it has chosen to fund outside the system of official development assistance, or ODA,as recorded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, leading to a lack of available resources detailing where exactly it spends its money and how it determines its sectoral and geographic priorities. Partly as a result of this, its activities have been marred by questions and speculations about how it spends its aid.
China is believed to spend several billion dollars a year on ODA-like projects, meaning that if it followed the OECD methodology, it might be the world’s sixth-largest donor.